The thoughts of an introvert nut

Tag Archives: monitor

For a while now I’ve been trying to set up VMware to work with multiple monitors, in a Linux guest. With some windowmanagers it works out of the box without any issue, such as with Unity. I never figured out how to do it with xmonad, and recently I switched to i3 just to try something new. The damn “Cycle multiple monitors” button didn’t work here either. When I tried it, a message popped up saying:

The virtual machine must have up-to-date VMware Tools installed and running.

..which it had! At this point I had installed vmware-tools, which is described as:

“A suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine’s guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine”

However, I found a solution! Place the following line in your i3 configuration file, whether it be ~/.i3/config or ~/.config/i3/config:

1

exec--no-startup-id vmware-user

..and that’s it! Reload your i3 configuration, and now you should be able to press the “Cycle multiple monitors” button and have dual monitors in your VMware guest!

Now, if you’re using open-vm-tools instead of the native vmware-tools, do what Fabian suggested – use the following line in your config-file instead: